Jewish Berlin

Synagogue Rykestrasse 53

(conservative, non-mixed seating) district: Prenzlauer Berg, transportation U-Bahn Line 2 to Senefelder Platz, tram 2 to Knaackstrasse

Friday night services: winter 6 pm, summer 7 pm Saturday morning services at 9.30 am

Because of renovation there will be no services in this synagogue at least until December 2006; the services take place in Oranienburger Strasse 29, Centrum Judaicum, 2nd floor (ancient library)

The Rykestrasse synagogue in Berlin (district Prenzlauer Berg) was inaugurated in September 1904 after only ten months of construction. A triple-nave basilica in neo-Romanesque style, was designed by Jewish community`s architect Johann Hoeniger, who conducted the construction. It is set across a courtyard from a brick building in a similar architectural style. This front building which opened its doors the same year, housed a Jewish primary school for about five hundred pupils. When later during Nazi era Jewish children were banned form public schools, the Rykestrasse school had to take more and more children. Lessons for 700 children continued until 1942.

The Rykestrasse had never been an orthodox prayer house. Here services followed the classic German liberal tradition: a full choir and a liturgy by Levandovsky. Today, there is but one synagogue in all of Germany that follows a Levandovsky service: the Pestalozzi synagogue in the western part of the city of Berlin.

After the Nazis came to power, the synagogue became a place where Berlin Jews could gather for cultural programs, seeking respite from discrimination in the workplace, schools and on the street. During the pogrom night of November 9th 1938 the Rykestrasse synagogue escaped relatively unharmed because it was situated in a court yard. Furniture was destroyed, Torah scrolls and prayer books were desecrated. Pessach 1939 the synagogue was reopened. Services were held until April 1940. The German army used the synagogue to store space for uniforms.

By the end of the war, only a handful of Berlin’s prewar Jewish population of about 170,000 had survived. Of some 7,000 Jews who stayed in Berlin after the war, about 1,500 were in the eastern sector. After Berlin`s liberation in 1945 by the Soviet Army the front building served as a center for displaced persons. The first postwar services took place in a small chapel at the shul, on July 13, The first marriage officiated by Rabbi Martin Riesenburger took place July 29th, 1945.

During the communist era, this synagogue served the small congregation of East Berlin`s Jewish Community. When the East Berlin community chairman fled to West Berlin after the Communists had cut telephone lines to the capitalist part of the city and Stalinist anti-Semitism rose and Rykestrasse became the only synagogue in the whole of East Germany where services were conducted, though there was rarely a minyan (the required quorum of ten men). All during those 39 years, Oljean Ingster kept the tradition going, but the number of community members declined from 900 in 1961 when the Berlin Wall was erected to around 209 in 1990 when the wall came down.

The two Jewish communities of East and West Berlin were reunited in 1990, but it would be more accurate to say the community in the east was simply subsumed into the larger one. Today Berlin's Jewish community has grown to 11,200 members, the vast majority of 80 % whom came from the former Soviet Union. (July 2006). In 1999 the Ronald S Lauder Foundation rented the entire front building and Joshua Spinner, an American-born rabbi, established the first orthodox yeshiva in Central Europe since the Holocaust which includes a teacher resource center, an adult education institute.

Students from Germany, Poland former USSR and other countries are enrolled full time in the yeshiva program. Others come for weekend machanot from all over Germany to deepen their Jewish knowledge. During summer 2006 the yeshiva program will shift to another district of Berlin and the midrasha program for women which had been started in Frankfurt will move to Rykestrasse. All this has turned the Rykestrasse into an improtant address of Jewish learning and activity, but they have little or nothing to do with the ancient Rykestrasse synagogue itself. They exist on parallel planes.

Behind the Iron Curtain – Tour: Jewish Life in Prenzlauer Berg

Contact: info@berlin-juedisch.de